At Stigan Media, our SEO team specializes in optimizing online presence for painters and painting contractors. We’ve managed successful SEO campaigns for several local painting businesses, helping them achieve impressive results.
For instance, one of our techniques boosted organic traffic for painting companies in British Columbia by over 57% within a half year. This significant increase was achieved through targeted strategies that enhanced their visibility on search engines.
How did we achieve such impressive results? Keep reading this article or save your time contact us for a free SEO audit for your towing companies.
1. Start with Proper Keyword Research
Keyword research is the foundation of any successful SEO strategy, especially for painters and painting contractors. It might seem straightforward, but there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye. As experts in SEO for painters and painting companies, we’ve systemized our keyword research process to ensure we identify the best keywords for painting contractors in BC. Here’s how we do it:
- Check Keyword Search Volume: We make sure to avoid ranking for keywords with zero search volume. For example, one of our previous clients proudly informed us they were #1 for the keyword “chip painting contractors Chinatown Toronto.” While they were indeed ranking first, the keyword had zero search volume, resulting in zero leads and zero visits from Google.
- Analyze Keyword Search Intent: We ensure that the keyword’s intent aligns with your business goals. Some keywords have commercial and local intent, which are beneficial for your business, like “painting contractors Toronto.” This indicates users are looking for painting services in their area. However, some keywords have informational intent, such as “How much do painting services cost in Vancouver?” In such cases, Google often shows blog articles that are not tied to a specific location, providing little value for your business.
- Assess Keyword Difficulty: We use advanced tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush to determine keyword difficulty. Our SEO agency invests in the best tools to identify the most effective keywords. We choose keywords based on your budget. If the budget is limited, we target low-competition yet effective keywords that can drive SEO traffic and leads for your painting contractor clients.
Keyword research in SEO for painters is like pouring the foundation for a house. If it’s not done correctly, the entire SEO strategy won’t be successful. By ensuring thorough and accurate keyword research, we lay a solid foundation for your SEO efforts, leading to long-term success.
2. Double Checking Initial Web Analytics Steps Before Proceeding to Actual SEO Work
Many SEO agencies for painters and painting companies dive straight into SEO tasks once keywords are confirmed with the client. At Stigan Media, we go the extra mile by thoroughly double-checking all web analytics tracking basics before improving SEO.
Ensuring proper tracking is crucial to providing our painting contractor clients with accurate and valuable SEO reports. Here’s our process:
- Verify Google Analytics 4: We ensure that Google Analytics 4 is correctly tracking your website data.
- Check Google Search Console: This tool from Google tracks your SEO stats and identifies technical errors. We make sure it’s set up and functioning properly.
- Access Google Business Page: We confirm proper access to your Google Business Page, which is essential for local SEO.
- Add to Bing and Apple Maps: We list your painting business on Bing and Apple Maps if it’s not already there.
- Set Up High-End SEO Software: We add your project to our advanced SEO software for position tracking.
- Configure Goals in Google Analytics 4: We set up goals in Google Analytics 4 to track conversions and leads accurately. This includes tracking website forms, email clicks, and phone number clicks.
By setting up these tracking measures, we can accurately measure the ROI (return on investment) for your business and the money you spend on SEO. Many SEO agencies skip this step, leading to misleading reports. At Stigan Media, we ensure you see the actual value from our SEO optimization efforts.
3. Website SEO Architecture Audit
The next crucial step is auditing the current website architecture. In most cases, there are many areas for improvement that benefit both SEO and user experience. For painting companies, having a well-structured website link architecture is extremely important.
During this phase, we determine which pages are driving traffic and generating leads for your painting business. These are the pages we prioritize for optimization. Our process includes:
- Page Optimization: We identify and optimize the key pages that attract traffic and leads, ensuring they are effectively structured and contain relevant content.
- Internal Linking: We implement a proper internal linking strategy, connecting these pages to enhance SEO and improve user navigation.
- Navbar and Footer Optimization: We optimize the navigation bar and footer to ensure they are user-friendly and contain links to important pages.
By improving the website’s architecture, we make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site, leading to better rankings and an enhanced user experience.
4. SEO Content Optimization
Next, we focus on content optimization for the pages targeting the painting contractor keywords you’ve chosen. This process usually begins with rewriting the content on these pages. To ensure we provide the best content for Google’s algorithms, we use an advanced tool called Surfer SEO. This tool analyzes top-ranking pages, examines their content, and algorithmically calculates the optimal number of keywords we need to use.
Here’s how we do it:
- Analyze with Surfer SEO: We use Surfer SEO to analyze the first-page results and determine the ideal keyword density and structure.
- Collaborate with Clients: We discuss with our house painting company clients to identify essential information that must be included on the page.
- Expert Copywriting: Our experienced SEO copywriting team then creates high-converting content that fits all the keywords as per the analysis.
Many SEO agencies for painting services fail at this step, hiring cheap outsourced writers who produce low-quality content just to stuff in keywords. While this might temporarily boost SEO rankings, it often results in a poor user experience, causing visitors to leave the site quickly.
At Stigan Media, we prioritize writing engaging, high-quality content. Our in-house team of local writers ensures that the text is not only optimized for SEO but also engaging and informative, keeping visitors on your site and converting them into customers.
5. On-Page SEO Optimization
The next step is on-page optimization, not just for the targeted SEO pages but for the entire website. Here’s a quick recap of what you should do to rank your painting contractor website on Google:
- Meta Titles Optimization: Include your major keyword, e.g., “Toronto painting contractors.”
- Meta Description Optimization: While not a direct ranking factor, it increases your click-through rate, eventually benefiting SEO.
- Alt Tags Optimization: Optimize images with proper and natural descriptions that include targeted keywords.
- H1 Optimization: Ensure there is only one H1 per page, clearly explaining what the page is about. Including the painting contractor keyword and location can be beneficial.
- H2 to H6 Optimization: Use these headings to structure the content for both users and search engines. Avoid over-optimizing with targeted keywords.
- Add Related Schemas: Implement schema markup to help Google understand your website and optimize Google snippets, such as reviews about your painting contractor business.
- Check SEO-Friendly URLs: Ensure URLs are structured well and include targeted keywords. This step should ideally be completed during the website architecture phase but always double-check.
- Internal Linking: Establish a proper internal linking structure throughout the website, including the nav bar and footer.
- NAP (Name, Address, Phone) on Targeted Pages: Since painting contractors are local businesses, it’s essential to embed a map with accurate name, address, and phone number information.
- Add Customer Testimonials with Keywords: Include real reviews from your clients to show search engines that your business is trusted.
- E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness): Use various techniques to demonstrate why your business should be trusted. Add designations, certificates, awards, and ensure the team page has thorough information about key team members in your painting contractor business.
By following these on-page SEO optimization steps, we ensure that your painting contractor website is well-optimized, user-friendly, and trusted by search engines, leading to better rankings and increased traffic.
6. Local SEO and Google Business Profile Optimization
For painting contractors, local SEO is essential because your business is tied to a specific location and you want to rank near your potential clients. This part is crucial to optimize.
Following our previous steps, we’ve already added Google Maps with proper contact information. Now, it’s time to connect your website with your Google Business Profile and optimize it in every possible way.
Here’s our process:
- Complete Google Business Profile: We ensure that the URL and all fields are filled correctly with proper keyword usage.
- Relevant Categories: We check and update your profile with relevant and additional categories.
- Image Optimization: We update and optimize images on your Google Business Profile.
- Service Area Optimization: We make sure your service areas cover the most targeted locations.
- Regular Updates: We keep your Google Business Profile updated by regularly adding posts.
One of the most challenging aspects of ranking Google Business Profiles is acquiring reviews, which play a significant role in ranking. While our SEO skills can optimize many aspects, reviews require active participation from painting contractor clients to build a strong business reputation. Encouraging reviews, especially those using targeted keywords, is crucial. We provide templates to clients that help in garnering SEO-friendly reviews. If you want fast ranking results, start working on getting reviews now. Our team also replies to all reviews in the most professional and SEO-friendly manner.
Avoid Fake Reviews: Do not consider buying fake reviews. Google is increasingly adept at identifying fake reviews, and your Google Business Profile might get suspended. Think long-term, not short-term.
Additionally, we optimize your Bing Business Profile as well to ensure comprehensive local SEO coverage.
7. Technical SEO for Painting Contractors
The next crucial aspect is technical SEO, which can be challenging for low-quality SEO agencies. Many agencies skip this step or don’t fully address it. While basic technical SEO is simple, we go the extra mile to meet Google’s technical requirements for your website.
Fixing 301 and 404 Pages
First, we use a tool called Screaming Frog to crawl your painting contractor’s website and see how search algorithms perceive it. This helps us identify 301 pages (redirects) and 404 pages (non-existent pages that still appear on your site). We fix these issues immediately to ensure all pages return a 200 OK status, indicating a successful request.
Speed Optimization
Next, we focus on speed optimization. Since 2019, Google has warned websites with long loading times. We use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to analyze and then optimize your website’s speed. Here’s an example of a painting contractor project we optimized (screenshot below).
Thoroughly Checking Mobile Version
Many developers overlook proper mobile versions, leading to common issues like small font sizes, elements being too close together, and broken styles. Our SEO team inspects your mobile site and passes any issues to our web development team for fixes, ensuring a user-friendly mobile experience.
Check if SSL Works Properly
We also verify that your SSL certificate is valid and functioning correctly. An expired SSL certificate will mark your website as unsafe, potentially leading to lost rankings.
By addressing these technical SEO elements, we ensure that your painting contractor website meets all the necessary technical requirements, providing a solid foundation for successful SEO efforts.
8. Off-Page SEO
The final and most challenging step is off-page SEO, which involves acquiring backlinks (links that refer to your website). Many webmasters and even experienced SEOs struggle with this step. Getting backlinks not only requires a lot of time, effort, and money but also knowledge because not all backlinks are beneficial. Using cheap backlink services from freelance websites like Fiverr can result in low-quality links that may harm your website.
At Stigan Media, we have developed a systematic backlink approach that helps in ranking painting contractor businesses.
Local Directory Listings
The first step is to list your business in every possible local directory. We shortlist reliable and reputable local directories to link back to your website. Listing your address and phone number in these directories provides a good signal for local SEO, helping Google better understand your location.
High-Quality Backlinks from Relevant Domains
Over the years, we have built relationships with many site owners who allow us to post on their websites and provide relevant links to our clients. Currently, we work with over 1,000 reputable websites to help our painting contractor clients gain high-quality links. Not many agencies can offer such a network.
Disavow Toxic Links
Spammers, competitors, or even yourself might have created bad links to your website that negatively impact your organic rankings. Our SEO team inspects the quality of each backlink to your website. If a link is toxic, we add it to a “disavow” file and submit it to search engines, indicating that we disassociate ourselves from those backlinks.
By following these off-page SEO strategies, we ensure that your painting contractor website gains valuable, high-quality backlinks, enhancing its authority and improving its search engine rankings.
9. Conclusion
SEO is a powerful tool for painting contractors looking to increase their online visibility, attract more customers, and grow their business. By applying the techniques we’ve discussed, you can significantly improve your website’s search engine rankings and drive more traffic to your site. If you find these steps complicated, feel free to contact us for a quote. At Stigan Media, we’re here to help you achieve your SEO goals and ensure your painting contractor business thrives online.
At Stigan Media, we focus on SEO for painting contractors. If SEO challenges you, consider our free SEO audit for your website.
Stigan Media is an award-winning web design & marketing agency specializing in WordPress, WebFlow, and Shopify. Our team focuses on SEO, PPC and conversion optimization strategies to help your company grow.